Strong public option a cure for system

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Rep. Grijalva says voters should get the successful public option they want and deserve.
Jay Westcott

My support for such a plan is based on the reality of the insurance market. Because tens of millions of Americans lack health insurance, we must create a plan that can help sick people get well, help struggling families get and keep good coverage and help contain the costs of medicines and procedures often out of reach even for the middle class. We must start somewhere in addressing these disparities, and progressives will continue to play the constructive role we have played throughout this process. If I believe a public option as written in any final bill can help, I will vote for it. My conscience dictates nothing less than full support of a program that can lessen the injustice of our broken health care system.

My support is not unconditional. I believe certain proposals now being advanced would be fatal to the effectiveness of any public option, and I will very strongly consider voting against any bill that includes them. Among these is the notion of waiting to create a public option until a “trigger” point has been reached. As we have seen with Medicare Part D, these sorts of triggers do not go off. They are designed to sound appealing and appear to be a useful compromise.

In fact, they are designed to let everyone take credit for supporting a good program without accepting responsibility the next day when it doesn’t go into effect. A public option must be active from Day One to give doctors and hospitals confidence when they consider whether to participate. If a public option rests in political limbo for several years, it may as well not have been in the bill.

Allowing states to opt out of a public option is a second moderate-sounding compromise that will undermine the program from the get-go. It is unfair to create a national mandate for citizens to buy health insurance, only to allow states, for ideological reasons, to deny their citizens access to the public version. My state of Arizona is only one of several — including Texas — likely to take that step the morning after the president signs the bill into law. “Opt out” will not work, and it will not receive my support.

We are close to enacting truly historic health care reform. This is a moment on a par with the passage of Medicare and Social Security. Twenty years from now, Americans will look back at this Congress and have a great deal to say about whether we passed a public option that worked or a fig leaf that did nothing to address the problem. With so much at stake and the final threshold so near, I urge my colleagues to consider the best policies for the nation and give voters the successful public option they want and deserve.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) is the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Readers' Comments (30)

Yes, voters should get the successful public option they want and deserve. Yes, healthcare reform will save money. Yes, the best health insurance with regards to quality, cost, and accessibility is all government run: medicare, military Tricare.

The best in cost, quality, accessibility, and patient and healthprovider satisfaction is government-run heath insurance.

Health care reform will be based on these plans.

Isn't that hilarious?

Yet GOP and teabaggers have been out telling seniors and others only lies about healthcare reform. Lies. And they work for insurance companies who are one of the greediest for profit trade groups around.

We must live in different universes.I know of no one that whats a public option.There is great mistrust of Obama and the democrats.A lot of people get it now that Obama is Marxist.2010 will be a banner year for Republicans.

A public option, we argued, should look very similar if it is also to save the government money and provide affordable health care to the public at large. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that a “robust” public option paying Medicare rates plus 5 percent would save the government $110 billion over its first 10 years.

Lies - lies - lies.

This is not going to save any money, it's going to cost more than the Piglosi has said $1.2 trillion (she just threw in another 285 pages) and it's going to destroy the best medical system in the world.

It's humiliating to have people laugh in your face, well, you'd have to be able to suffer humiliation ... something these arrogant liberals seem to have devolved away from.

The public option (government intervention into the free market) so far has failed to keep the country from sliding toward 10% unemployment. Only fools would try to build on that lack of success and use it "reform" a health care system that's not really broken.

You wanna insure the uninsured? Take some of the stimulus money that you boneheads haven't spent and just BUY THEM INSURANCE ALREADY.

HEALTH CARE MUST GET PAST NOW WITH PUBLIC OPTION OR IT WILL NOT GET DONE.....WHICH, OF COURSE, IS WHAT THE REPUBLICANS WANT...THEY DO NOT WANT ANY PART OF IT WE WASTED ENOUGH TIME ON THEM. PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS TO GET IT DONE NOW!

FIRST OF ALL HEALTH CARE REFORM IS NOT JUST FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT INSURANCE....I HAVE INSURANCE AND I WOULD LIKE A PUBLIC OPTION.. MAYBE THEN MY PREMIUMS WOULD NOT GO UP SO HIGHT EVERY YEAR. I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYONE THAT DOES NOT WANT A PUBLIC OPTION. DO YOU RENT A ROOM AT FOX NEWS? ; OR DO YOU HAVE THE SAME INSURANCE AS THE SENATORS AND CONGRESSMEN WHICH BY THE WAY TAXPAYERS PAY FOR.. I COME IN CONTACT WITH MANY PEOPLE AND MANY OF THEM WANT HEALTH REFORM AS WELL AS A PUBLIC OPTION. WHY DO YOUR FRIENDS MISTRUST PRESIDENT OBAMA? HMMMMMMM

A pure public option, with government sales tax funding, replacing insurance, along with distributing all government funded care only through government owned and operated hospitals, staffed by government employed doctors and health care providers, using proven VA systems, is the most cost effective and morally correct way for fixing half of the health care problem.

The second half of the solution is to have a pure private option, with private insurance and only private funding, paying for care and medications dispenssed by private providers, that would not be subjected to any government mandates.

“Governments unfair advantages” need to be used to bring the efficiencies that will allow high quality health care for consumers, eliminate costs and hassles for businesses, and save taxpayers hundreds of billions annually.

Nobody can collect the money to pay for health care as cheaply as the government can by using a national sales tax, and nobody can deliver high quality care and medications as cost effectively as the VA.

Everyone shopping in the United States would pay pennies on the dollar supporting public health care, citizens, immigrants, 40 million visiting tourists annually, the rich, poor, everybody contributes, this would be the ultimate risk spreading pool.

Paying for public health care using sales tax revenues would be billions of dollars cheaper each year than using private insurance and it would be a prudent cost effective way to spread risks while paying for health care as it is used instead of increasing the national debt.

America’s Veteran Administration is the largest, lowest cost; best outcome producing at any cost, health care delivery system in the US, it uses the world’s best medical software, and it has been controlling the problems with access, cost, quality, and malpractice successfully for years.

See Phillip Longman’s book Best Care Anywhere, Why VA Health Care Is Better Than Yours.

All government funded costs could be reduced drastically, while producing better patient outcomes, if distributed only through civilian government hospitals using the proven VA systems.

This solves the Medicare, Medicaid and all other government funded quality and cost control problems that no one will talk about, while giving seniors free care and medications, which would be an infinitely better deal than we have today.

Everyone choosing public care could have it no restrictions, no insurance, no co pays, free period.

Employers who select public care for their employees would not be required to pay for or have any further involvement with health care.

A National Health Care System could also take over states and local government’s health care systems to assure operating standards and relieve local funding problems while providing total transferability for patients.

Private health care's roll in public/private reform should be to attract every client they can who would find their services so compelling that patients would pay good money to voluntarily purchase their services.

The private care option would allow individuals or businesses to keep or select from an unlimited choice of doctors, clinics, hospitals, timing, and treatments, Ford Fiesta or Rolls-Royce, but it would require the user to pay privately for their health services, either by self pay, company pay, private insurance, whatever, but government funded programs should only be distributed through the new national system to assure cost control and outcomes.

Private insurance and care providers should no longer be required to subsidize indigent and preexisting condition patients or deal with any government mandates.

Tort reform would do wonders for private health care, as would to permit insurance companies to sell across state lines, and not taxing any private insurance or private health care plans provided by employers; this would allow the private health care industry to thrive in a new dual public/private choice system.

Using a dedicated national sales tax funding source in conjunction with the VA's delivery and software records systems means we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to rapidly create this dual health care reform system

The system could be jump started by acquiring health delivery systems around the country that would choose to sell to, and be integrated into, the new public National Health Care System.

Building new public health care facilities would produce capital assets that will continue to serve Americans for generations, and provide millions of construction jobs today and millions of new health care jobs forever.

Going back and forth between free public, and user purchased private care, would allow unlimited choices, ultimate freedom, and always free public care would be available.

Making high quality health care easily available for consumers and employers while saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually is easy for everyone to understand, and the CBO to demonstrate, if the President, legislators and the media will allow people to hear the facts.

Let’s compare this common sense dual system that would allow unlimited choices, ultimate freedom, and always free public care would be available, to the reforms being proposed by anyone from the President on down.

Then let’s use simple straight forward legislation to make these changes happen that will give us high quality fiscally responsible health care reform.

Healthy people and a healthy economy could be achieved if the Presidents number one goal to reform health care were more prudently crafted.

IT saddens me that the public is so easily swayed by the Republicans, that vitually destroyed our financial markets from which we are still recovering. Talk about memory loss.

A public option is essential. The house and senate has a public health care system as well as your teachers. Medicare and the V. A. are public health care systems. They are efficient and save billions of dollars. Should the American people have the same health insurance?

The Republicans do not seem to think so. Since their greedy hands are into the stocks of the insurance company's, drug and medical suppy companies it is no wonder we are getting the scare tactics of socialism and our seniors are going to die.

Get a clue America, stop watcing T.V. and get your health coverage before the lack of it continues to kill our loved ones.

IT saddens me that the public is so easily swayed by the Republicans, that vitually destroyed our financial markets from which we are still recovering. Talk about memory loss.

A public option is essential. The house and senate has a public health care system as well as your teachers. Medicare and the V. A. are public health care systems. They are efficient and save billions of dollars. Should the American people have the same health insurance?

The Republicans do not seem to think so. Since their greedy hands are into the stocks of the insurance company's, drug and medical suppy companies it is no wonder we are getting the scare tactics of socialism and our seniors are going to die.

Get a clue America, stop watcing T.V. and get your health coverage before the lack of it continues to kill our loved ones.

Let me say this to you. DO YOU NOT LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE? Are you not sent there to REPRESENT the people? Every member of congress KNOWS DAMN WELL that the people do not want this communist takeover of our government.

This is not health care, it has nothing to do with health and you know it. It is a blatent power grab of Americans Life Liberty and Happiness and you do not have the power under the constitution to do it.

Get a clue! Kill this bill, Kill cap and tax, Kill immigration AND GET TO WORK GETTING AMERICANS JOBS, AND GETTING CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY!

Rep. Grijalva, you're a left-wing ultra-liberal nut case who happens to be my representative. How Yuma ever got gerrymandered into the same House district as Tucson, I will never know. You don't represent my views or the views of the majority of voters here in Yuma.

With or without the public option, the democrats health care bill is seriously flawed and a legislative monstrosity. The government should not even be health care business or the health insurance business. This is a socialistic power grab, period, nothing more and nothing less. You are trying to buy votes from the poor by giving them another handout with earnings stolen from the rich. Charity is noble, but stealing is a crime. I hope you and this health bill both get out of Washington ASAP. We don't need either of you.

Yes, voters should get the successful public option they want and deserve. Yes, healthcare reform will save money. Yes, the best health insurance with regards to quality, cost, and accessibility is all government run: medicare, military Tricare.

The best in cost, quality, accessibility, and patient and healthprovider satisfaction is government-run heath insurance.

Health care reform will be based on these plans.

Isn't that hilarious?

Very. You should write fiction. Government has f'ked up everything they have touched.

...we're going to pass a health care plan written by a Committee whose Chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a President that also hasn't read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury Chief who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese,

IT saddens me that the public is so easily swayed by the Republicans, that vitually destroyed our financial markets from which we are still recovering.

Masterdel: Nov. 4, 2009 - 11:13 AM EST

Since their greedy hands are into the stocks of the insurance company's, drug and medical suppy companies it is no wonder we are getting the scare tactics of socialism and our seniors are going to die.